Category: cats

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Sunday Morning

What have I done already today?

Tried to take a photo of the sunrise from my bedroom window. Opened the window to get a better view, and a credit card and train ticket fell out of my phone wallet onto the flat roof of the extension below. Fortunately, a few days ago I found in my bedroom a litter grabber which I bought when I was living in the flat and had a similar accident with something on the roof of the bay window. I couldn’t manage to pick the card up, but I did succeed in knocking it off onto the patio/gravel. Went downstairs in my dressing gown and opened the door, saw credit card immediately over by the garden table. Walked over gravel in bare feet and picked it up. Went back inside and picked gravel off my feet.

Checked the credit cards in my phone and realised my Barclaycard (the one I most often use) was missing. The last time I used it was in the knitting shop yesterday, where I went to buy some yarn for my weather blanket. I emptied my coat pockets and handbag but couldn’t find it, looked around all the obvious places, still no sign. Went back out into the garden, couldn’t see it anywhere on the gravel, peeped through a gap in the fence at next door’s patio but it wasn’t obviously there. It started to rain. I rummaged around in some plants/weeds (false valerian, which is pretty in small doses but grows like a weed) between the edge of my steps and the fence, and found my Barclaycard.

Went back inside, picked gravel off my feet again, went back to bed, and back to sleep, although it was nearly six o’clock by this time. Had a dream, which was very interesting when I woke up, but I’ve now forgotten. Woke up shortly before eight and got up. Fed cat, let her out. Did yoga/tai chi. Picked up clothes from bedroom floor, found a complete set of clean bed linen (including matching pillow cases) and had first attempt at changing the duvet cover.

Took washing basket downstairs and loaded the contents into the washing machine. Tried to pull out the dispenser drawer – which is filthy and I’ve been thinking for a while it needs cleaning – but it got stuck half way and then I couldn’t get it back in and couldn’t get it all the way out. I used to have a Persil ball but lost it somewhere, and bought a large bottle with another one, but lost that too, so I took a top from a fabric conditioner bottle, filled that and balanced it on the washing then switched on the machine. Had shower and washed hair. Made coffee.

Now here I am, still in my dressing gown (but clean), writing my blog and drinking coffee. I can’t remember what I was thinking about while I was doing my exercises, two hours ago, but I don’t suppose it was important.

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Two Days in One (Again)

Wednesday, 05 May 2021

I started writing, but after about 100 words looked up and realised nothing was happening, the last couple of sentences I’d typed weren’t there. I thought I must have accidentally overwritten it, as sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention, then I found that my mouse wasn’t working, tried the touchpad on my keyboard and that wasn’t working, nothing was working, I had no cursor. I waited for a while, then tried alt-del-ctrl and that didn’t do anything either, everything was frozen, so I switched off and started it up again. When I finally got back into Word, what I’d written wasn’t autosaved, so I had to start all over again, even though I didn’t really want to write this morning anyway.

When I got home on Tuesday I called my cat a few times, but she didn’t respond. This isn’t like her, when I’ve been away she’s usually really pleased to see me, but I didn’t worry, thinking she would come out when she was ready. I spent about an hour in the kitchen, very excited to have wifi in there at last – my son installed a booster for me when he was here on Saturday, and I now have wifi in the kitchen and bedrooms, which has been a huge bugbear for me in the four years I’ve been living here. I thought she’d appear, but she didn’t, so I went round everywhere calling her name and looking in her usual hiding places. Got my dinner – and hers – then afterwards went into the front room for my evening telly-watching. Still no cat. About eight o’clock I went all round upstairs again, and in the study (I’d been in there before) I found a little face peeping out nervously from the bottom of a book case hidden in the corner behind piles of junk and stuff.

I need to do something about this room. It is so awful. I just leave it and leave it and let it get worse.

Thursday, 06 May 2021

That’s what I got to yesterday and then gave up. Maybe today I’ll just fill up what’s left. This week I don’t seem able to come up with a full 500 words on any day. The words are there, they always are, but the inner critic keeps batting them away as being too boring or too depressing or whatever.

I got a text from my daughter, asking if I want to go and stay with them after the 17th but before she goes back to work. I told her about losing and finding the cat, and about the mess in the study. She and her sister-in-law want to go away without the kids and husbands for a few days, maybe to the cabin and I have a key now, so I could get the train and she could meet me at the station. Or she might come here and help me sort out the study, then take me back with her. I sent her photos of the mess.

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Catflap Incident

Tuesday again – tai chi again. I’m more relaxed about it this morning.

I got up early – 6:15 – because my cat came and got me. That’s not unusual, mostly I ignore her but today I got up because I needed a pee, and as soon as I got out of bed she ran in front of me to the top of the stairs. When I came out of the toilet, I looked over the banister, and there she still was, half way down the stairs, looking up at me meaningfully. So I followed her downstairs, went into the kitchen and opened the back door for her to go out.

This follows a strange incident yesterday evening. I was sitting in the front room crocheting and watching telly, she had gone out into the hall, and suddenly I heard a banging noise as of something being knocked over, and an almighty feline shriek. It sounded as though it was inside the house, so all I could think was that one of the neighbouring cats had got in while the back door was open earlier, they’d found one another and there’d been an altercation. I walked round the house calling her name quietly, and expecting a large ball of fur to fly past me, but I couldn’t find any cats or other signs of destruction. I came back downstairs and opened the side door, and then found her sitting outside, the other side of the catflap.

You may know that I had this catflap put into the ‘side’ door – so called (by me) not because it is actually on the side of the house but to differentiate it from the ‘back’ door which is at the end of the kitchen. The ‘side’ door is at the end of the hall which runs from the front door to the end of the front half of the house which is connected directly to the next house in the terrace. There is then another bit of hall going to the left, and the back part of the house, consisting of the kitchen/dining room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, is attached to the house on the other side, but on the side where the door is, there’s a narrow space – same width as the door – between my kitchen, and a wall, behind which is an equivalent space and the neighbour’s kitchen. (This is where – I suspect – my neighbours were sneaking out and smoking dope in the lockdown last summer, but that’s another story.)

She has never to my knowledge used this catflap, but I think that must be what happened last night. I guessed the shriek was because there’s a drop of a couple of feet on the other side. When it was installed, I built a ramp for her with bricks and a plank, but when my son was carrying bits of shed from the hall into the garden, I moved it out of the way.

I don’t suppose she’ll ever try that again.

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Oyster Shell

Yesterday morning I took the cat to the vet’s for a ‘Senior Wellness check’. This used to be called a ‘Senior Health check’ and I couldn’t help imagining them burning aromatherapy candles, playing soothing music and maybe giving her a back massage. I had to drop her off at the surgery because of current lockdown conditions, and wait till they called me back to come and collect her. Because of the blood tests she wasn’t allowed anything to eat after ten the night before, which usually means pleading looks until it’s time to go, but in fact she just stayed out of the way, and when it was time to go allowed me to pick her up and put her in the basket with no struggles or complaints. In fact, she was unnaturally subdued, and still is this morning. When I collected her, the nurse asked if she could take her home to teach her own cat a lesson in manners, which is a far cry from this time last year when I dropped her off and went to the Co-op, then got a phone call from the vet asking for permission to sedate her because she was kicking up such a fuss.

She’s getting old. We all get old and resigned to the way things are. I guess that’s the way I’m feeling at the moment – except when I’m in a panic over something or other. Lockdown lethargy.

On my desk there’s an oyster shell. I don’t know where it came from – well, the beach, obviously, and before that in the sea, wrapped around an oyster. But how did it come to be on my desk? My house is full of oyster shells, and ‘interesting’ pebbles, picked up from beach walks. But this one in particular… I don’t know – it must have fallen out of a box of ‘stuff’ or something. I don’t know what it is about oyster shells – I used to think they were ugly, not like the pretty little scallops, rosy pink and smaller than my thumbnail, or the slipper limpets with their oddly shaped cavity. They are rough and monochrome and no two are ever alike, but if you turn them over and the light catches in just the right way, sometimes the gleam of mother-of-pearl will take you by surprise. I used that image in my poem ‘Beachcomber’. The document on my computer has it as:

The shimmer of an oyster shell,
Like tears for a lost pearl.

Linda Rushby July 2015

That’s funny – I could have sworn I used ‘gleam’. Maybe I changed it. Poems are not immutable. But when I check the book, I find that I published it as:

‘Oyster shells shimmer
Like tears for a lost pearl.

‘Beachcombing‘, Linda Rushby April 2016

Well well well. That scans better, and it has the alliteration too, but I still like ‘gleam’, it has a lovely sound.

Which reminds me, someone bought a copy of ‘Beachcombing’ from Amazon last year, the first time it’s sold other than sales I’ve made in person.

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Tired

Why can cats sleep for so much of the time and I sleep for so little?

Why do I lie in bed for so long in the mornings even though I don’t get back to sleep and I know that lying awake in bed for two hours isn’t going to make me happier, in fact quite the reverse?

Yesterday morning I made up my mind that this morning I wouldn’t lie in bed, but would get up and go to the beach to watch the sunrise, and I could have done it, I was awake in plenty of time and it wasn’t raining, but still I didn’t, I just lay there thinking about it and then got up just before seven and did the usual stuff and felt angry with myself. Well, I did listen to half an hour of radio, but even after that, I still had plenty of time to get up and go if I’d made myself do it.

They say two hours of deep sleep is the minimum you need to stay healthy, and I’ve been getting an average of 90 minutes over the two years I’ve been able to monitor it My fit-bit broke towards the end of last year, and I’ve lost all that historical data, but I got a new one this month which shows my average overall sleep for the last few weeks is six and a half hours, including an hour and a half of deep sleep, which is about the same as it was before.

I am tired – permanently tired – is all I’m trying to say, but I think most people who know me understand that already, I’ve moaned enough about it down the years. I’m tired and I look through tired eyes, and I have no energy or enthusiasm to do anything at all, but I hate myself for sitting and doing nothing and I wonder, if this is the endgame of my life, what then? Of course, there’s no reason to assume that this is the ‘endgame’, but I can’t see the future, I don’t know what it holds or what it potentially could hold, or how I could influence it in any way, or how I would even want it to be if it’s not going to be more of the same. All that running away has brought me here – I don’t mean geographically (I’m happy with that) but psycho-emotionally, I am the same person I kept running away from. Geographically I think I’ve found as good a place as I could have hoped for, but on those other terms I am as stuck as ever I was. All those things that were going to make me a different person, change my feelings about myself and allow me to grasp my destiny – children, PhD, leaving my husband, travelling across Europe, writing a book, moving to the south coast – haven’t made a scrap of difference to the sense that I’m as much a disaster as I always was.

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Snow in Texas

When I switched on the radio this morning, I heard a meteorologist from Houston explaining what ‘black ice’ is, which struck me as somewhat surreal.

But I know they get snow in Texas, I’ve experienced it. Ex-Hubby and I lived in Dallas from March 1985 till May 1989, so we spent four winters there, during which time we twice saw snow lying on the ground for several days, which was about as much as we could expect to see in Bedford (and a lot more than I’ve seen in Southsea in six years).

The clearest in my memory was at the beginning of March 1989, the weekend before I was due to give birth, when the baby shower had to be cancelled because nobody wanted to risk driving – least of all me, who didn’t fancy risking walking either. I have a distinct memory of stepping gingerly over compacted and frozen snow ridges to get to my car, though goodness knows where I was going that was so urgent

I’m sure there must be photos somewhere – but I have been looking for them in the study and have now given up the will to live. I pulled out the albums from that time, and found the one from March 1989 which should have had some, but couldn’t find any with snow on, just lots of baby pictures. There didn’t seem to be an album covering December 1987, which would have been the other snowy occasion – there must have been one, but goodness knows where.

Once I’d got all the albums off the shelf and flicked through them, I couldn’t face putting them back. In my defence, getting to the shelf required me to lean over a pile of junk on the floor and hurt my back. I did manage to get to another shelf which was slightly easier to get at, but just dumped them on there without any attempt to put them in order, which of course will make it even harder to find the next time I want to. This is why my life is such a mess, and yes, I am my own worst enemy, and no, I never get any better.

I am feeling lost now, lost in the past and the chaos and detritus of my life, and my emotions, and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Which tells me I don’t want to do any more today. So I put my arms around my cat – who is sitting on the desk right in front of me – and bury my face in her fur. To my amazement, although she wriggles a little, she doesn’t try to get away. I do it again, gently, and she lets me stay for several seconds, then turns to look out of the window, and I let her go. I follow her gaze into a drizzly February day, and watch the steam curling out from a pipe just under the roof eaves of the pub across the road against the grey sky.

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Alternative Offices

Everything seems to be conspiring against me writing this morning – well, maybe not everything, but certainly Microsoft, which resents my determination not to pay for Office 365, but continue to use the version of Office which I bought in good faith ten years ago, and which I have always found perfectly adequate for my needs. In revenge, it periodically tells me it has to reconfigure Office, and this morning I sat in front of the screen for ages getting more and more irritated, and rapidly losing the will to live, let alone write – so much so that I’ve come downstairs and am using the laptop instead.
This isn’t an ideal solution, partly because it requires me to sit on the armchair with the laptop on (surprise, surprise) my lap, which is not healthy in terms of either my posture or my eyesight – both of which cause me problems at this stage in my life. The other issue is that I don’t have any version of MS Office on my laptop any more, because the free trial version of 365 has now expired, and I can’t install my old version because it’s on a CD and there is no CD drive (besides which, no doubt I would get the same ‘configuration’ problems, though it might be quicker because at least the wifi in the front room is better than the study).
So I’m trying to get to grips with Open Office, which I’m sure I’ll get my head around eventually, but at the moment I find myself missing some of the features I’m used to with the MS version – though this is more of an issue with Excel/Calc than it is with Word. This morning I’ve found out how to insert the current date, but I’ve just noticed that I can’t see the wordcount without using the tool bar. That’s going to be annoying.
I was going to say more about the Madwoman in the Attic this morning, but I’ve been distracted by all these irritations and now may just fill in the rest of this post with moaning.
My poor cat joined me in the study just as I’d decided to give up on waiting for Office to configure and come downstairs. I explained to her what I was doing, but she hasn’t come down yet, even though I’ve been here for half an hour. Probably curled up asleep on her special chair. If she was here, of course, she would be trying to sit on my lap – which is currently occupied by… yes that’s correct. And, in another non-surprising surprise move, she has now just walked into the room – when I’m thinking of winding this up and going back upstairs, because that’s where the scanner is, and I’ve just remembered about a photograph I found among the stuff in the study, which I took on Cape Cod in June 1996, almost a quarter of a century ago. Does the message still apply?

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Worlds Within Worlds

Just been for my first trip to the shops this year. The last time was New Year’s Eve, when I arrived outside Sainsbury’s at ten past eight to find that they weren’t opening till nine, so I went to the Co-op instead. Not sure why they had different opening hours for New Year’s Eve – New Year’s Day is a holiday, but not the day before. Anyway, the Co-op was open as normal.

And today, I went to Sainsbury’s. Ten days – no, eleven – I must have stocked up really well – not just on Christmas stuff, but milk too, because that, as usual, was the indicator that sent me out this morning.

We all live in our own worlds, that’s what I was thinking earlier, before I went to Sainsbury’s. ‘We have just one world/But we live in different ones’, to quote Mark Knopfler (Brothers in Arms). Each of us has our own personal world inside our head, which evolves over time, partly from genetics, partly from the environment we live in, partly from our experiences of interaction with all the other worlds surrounding us, the physical, social, economic and cultural worlds (all of which can be considered as constituting the ‘environment’ to our personal world). Each of us has a world of incredible complexity inside our heads, whether we consciously realise it or not, even before we factor in the ways in which our internal world interacts with all those other internal worlds of all those other beings with whom we interact.

I was going to say ‘people’, but I said ‘beings’ because – well, even my little cat has her own world in her head, which leads her to predictable actions but is largely impenetrable to me – such as the way she was in the living room when I got home from the shop, but while I unpacked the shopping and made coffee, she came upstairs and was sitting on the landing outside the study door, waiting for me to come up and switch on the computer. She can predict my behaviour almost better than I can predict hers – sometimes we surprise each other, but given that our relationship is based on observation rather than verbal communication, it’s surprisingly mutual and very close – even more so since last year and my periods of lock-down.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this this morning (although in a way it is the basis of my PhD thesis). How do we understand all those other worlds that we crash into and bounce away from like billiard balls? The default position, I would suggest, is that we start from an assumption that our own world is ‘true’, and that other people’s experiences of and relationships with the world are broadly similar to ours – at least those with whom we are in close contact. In fact, we have to start from that assumption, that our own perceptions are based in some kind of shared reality, otherwise how can any kind of communication be possible?

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Leaving the Attic

I found a picture the other day of the attic room the last time I saw it, empty of furniture and with the cat sitting on the shelf in the alcove peeping out – I suspect I was hoovering , and that was why she’d climbed up out of the way. I was to be the last to leave the house – to go out of the front door and close it firmly behind me, with the cat in her basket and all her paraphernalia (food bowl, water bowl, litter tray) and drive her to Ex Hubby’s new house. She’d been shut in the empty attic room while the removal men took everything from the rest of the house and loaded the van. E-H (let’s call him that for short) had been waiting for the call from the solicitors to say the money had been transferred and he could go into the office to drop off the keys and pick up the ones for the new house. Weirdly, in our previous house move I’d also been the one left behind to close up while he and the children went to collect the keys. So I was last to enter and last to leave this place, though I’d first left it over seven years earlier. I had to give him time to get to the office, exchange the keys and then drive to the new place – I may even have been waiting for him to call me to confirm he was in there, I can’t remember, in fact I’d forgotten about that day until I saw the photo.

I used to joke that my mid-life crisis started when I began my PhD at 38, and never finished. But looking back from this perspective, I think it ended sometime in the year following that last day in the attic, after the final upheaval of moving the last of my stuff deposited that day in E-H’s new garage down to this house, somewhere in the trauma of chemo, maybe the dawning of the year after that – a quarter of a century of crises, depositing me at last on the shores of the third age, the Age (supposedly) of Wisdom.

Through my forties, I had the sense that my life-path was not going in the way I would have chosen, but that time was running out to find anything different. I’d pinned my hopes on being able to continue with an academic career, but that ground into the sand of endless, fruitless job applications, a succession of part-time, temporary admin jobs and a failing marriage. My fifties ultimately brought a new sense of hope, of the potential for doing things differently – it would take courage and persistence that I’d previously dismissed as impossible, and a willingness to walk away from a tarnished dream in search of a shiny new one.

I miss that hope now, as I sit here, on my captain’s chair at my leather-topped desk, watching the gulls fly calling past my window.

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Five Hundred Words

What can I say today that I haven’t said a million times before?

Every day: get up at seven (or thereabouts), feed cat and open the door for her to go out; half an hour of yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; make coffee; come up here and write 500 words; brush teeth; get dressed; have breakfast while doing su doku. That gets me to any time between 10:30 and 12:00. At one o’clock on weekdays, there’s an hour of crime-and-thrillers drama on Radio 4 extra, so I sit in my armchair in the bay window overlooking the street (but behind the hedge) and listen to that, while crocheting the previous day’s weather blanket square. At two, I may get lunch (if I haven’t had it before one), or stay where I am and listen to whatever’s on next, then at three there’s another hour of a drama serial, and at four, some days I switch over to Radio 4 and listen to what’s on there, until PM comes on at five, which I usually listen to also. At weekends the routine is slightly different, as the drama on the radio doesn’t start till three, and then there’s an hour on Radio 4 followed by another hour and a half (Saturday) or hour (Sunday, followed by Poetry Extra, which I also listen to). At six I go into the kitchen and prepare, cook and eat dinner, then around seven I usually go back in the front room, switch the telly on, and knit or crochet till around ten, when I make hot chocolate, listen to music, and carry on either knitting/crocheting or reading until bedtime (between eleven and eleven thirty).

There are variations, of course, usually involving going out to the shops in the morning. Otherwise, that’s pretty much it – but I don’t want you to think that I’m saying my life is boring, not a bit of it. I like this routine. The ‘activities’ (if you can call them that) are all – well, mostly – things I enjoy doing. It’s an undemanding life. Nobody needs me for anything, I’m not required to interact or communicate with any other human being (mostly), I can just trundle along letting each day go by, like I used to when I was travelling.

But a comment on Facebook yesterday raised the question: What is the point of any of this? The comment was made about something specific (posting pictures daily on FB) but it applies to everything, and it throws a stark light on the fact THAT MY LIFE, THE THINGS THAT I DO, ARE ALL COMPLETELY POINTLESS.

I didn’t deliberately make that phrase upper-case – I was just typing away as I usually do, looking at the keyboard instead of the screen, then looked up (because I wanted to delete something I’d written after that) and realised I must have accidentally pressed caps lock. So I’m not trying to emphasise that sentence, it just emphasised itself, which seems appropriate.

And now – oh look – 500.